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photo by Eric Jackson

A slight disruption

How’s the old saying go? Oh yes --- be careful of what you ask for, because you just might get it.

The ongoing roof replacement at the Muchachas Guias building, in which The Panama News office is located, has brought on floods, obstacles and most annoying of all, this infectious and destructive dust coming down from above. (Infectious? Understand that we have in the past few years had a couple of rat invasions, and in the filth that rained down from the ceiling in the course of this work were rat droppings and plenty of cockroach eggs. Destructive? I kid you not, I resolved one of the two computer crashes in the course of this work by taking the cover off of my computer and going after it with my vacuum cleaner, which, after reloading the programs, seems to have done the trick for awhile.)

Yeah, yeah --- no doubt many of you will say that this is just the excuse de jour, but the bottom line is that this issue will also take a few days longer than the theoretical deadline to finish.

Please don’t get me wrong. This roof job needed to happen, and the various plugs that The Panama News has done for it over many months helped to raise a substantial chunk of the money needed to do it.

The production schedule for this issue will also be disrupted by a huge unfolding story. President Torrijos has finally announced his Social Security reform package, it includes some draconian provisions such as a 67 percent increase in the months of contributions to become eligible for pensions --- from 15 to 25 years --- and on days when I’d normally be crashing and burning from a long production weekend there will be major protests to cover for the next issue. In the chess game between the labor movement and the president, only a few student radicals stepped into the trap of going immediately berserk once the very long document was released, thus “proving” that the critics were just looking for an excuse to riot. The labor movement took a few days to study the proposal, and met a few days later to decide what to do. They’re threatening a nationwide general strike, and a lot of very unradical people may be frightened or angry or disappointed enough join them. The plan has some provisions that fall particularly heavy on women and the self-employed, for examples.

Meanwhile, The Panama News has a new intern, George Mason University student Joel Inwood, who tells us of his first Panamanian breakfast in this issue’s dining section. While getting the other story for the dining pages, I also had breakfast. Fresh ceviche isn’t ordinarily what you would think of as breakfast fare, but when at the municipal seafood market on a Sunday morning it’s a good start for the day.

Also in this issue, I interview Telesur’s Aram Aharonian. The new TV channel, to start broadcasting in a few weeks on a satellite that Venezuela bought from China, promises to be for Latin America something akin to what Al Jazeera has been for the Arab world --- the electronic voice in a region that really hasn’t had such a thing. Its owners are the governments of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela and no doubt it will become the target of fierce criticism by the existing networks that so terribly misrepresent Latin America, when they aren’t ignoring our region as usual.

In the opinion section, one of the columns is something that Senators Coleman and Levin tried to keep you from seeing. Citing some alleged documentary evidence that they won’t produce and the word of prisoners who are subject to torture and threats in places like Abu Ghraib, they accused an antiwar British parliamentarian of being on the take from Saddam Hussein and he came to Capitol Hill and told them off. The senators hadn’t done their homework, and the institution hasn’t been so badly embarrassed since Joe McCarthy tried to smear the US Army for drafting Roy Cohn’s gay lover. So chairman Coleman and  vice chairman Levin compounded their shameful conduct by censoring The Congressional Record. But the text they tried to suppress is right here.

But let’s put the concept of disgraceful government into proper perspective here. Even if the US Senate went way out of its way to put on a real creep show, they weren’t half as disgraceful as the Panamanian Supreme Court has been lately. Yes, the Seguro Social changes are severe and will affect me personally, and people are riled up enough to go onto the streets and shout about it. But the argument about how to put the retirement fund on a sound basis is in the nature of economic bargaining, whereas the wholesale flagrant corruption of the high court is a matter of moral turpitude in high places about which there should be no negotiations. Panama needs to remove the hoodlum majority from the Supreme Court sooner rather than later. And if they want to accuse me of disrespect for saying that, so be it.

Ah, but all is not negative, because although they would be loathe to admit it, the political class is neither all nor even most of Panama, or of the United States for that matter. Thus we also have some positive tales to tell in this issue.

For example, in the outdoors section we check out a project that the World Wildlife Fund is carrying out in Bocas del Toro, in an attempt to save the Caribbean Sea’s threatened turtles. Plus we take time to enjoy the orchids, which should be done even in times of trouble.

And once this issue is put to bed and I have time to vacuum out this office, The Panama News will be working from a much improved headquarters.

Just bear with us, and enjoy.

Eric Jackson
the editor